


worthy of celebration

by zach_stone



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Birthday Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Happy Birthday Hermann!, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 10:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14893142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zach_stone/pseuds/zach_stone
Summary: It's a well-known fact around the Shatterdome that Hermann does not like his birthday. This year, Newt's determined to change that.





	worthy of celebration

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyy almost didn't make it in time, but it's still hermann's birthday in my timezone, so have this that i somehow slammed out in a couple hours. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BOY HERM, I LOVE U SPACE CHAMPION. <333
> 
> tbh i didnt follow exact canon timeline-wise for the kaiju attacks but honestly? i do what i want. 
> 
> a small aside, this fic is technically in the same universe as my fic "it might be over soon," but you don't need to read it for any of this to make sense. just know that one is how they got together! anyway, i hope you enjoy! i did a very quick proofread of this before posting, so if there are any typos, my bad.

It was a well-known fact around the Shatterdome that Dr. Gottlieb did _not_ like his birthday. He refused to even tell most people when it was, and if it weren’t for a certain Dr. Geiszler loudly shouting “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HERMANN!” one year in the middle of the crowded mess hall, it likely would have stayed a secret all the years he worked there. But alas, Newton was determined to embarrass Hermann in every way possible, especially during the early days of their working together, so the cat was out of the bag, as it were. Not that most people remembered now, years after that incident. Even Newt had toned it down in recent years, what with the war getting worse and virtually all time for celebration and frivolity vanishing in favor of all-nighters in the lab, arguing and frantically searching for solutions.

So he was a bit surprised when he got to the lab on this particular birthday to find what appeared to be homemade confetti scattered all across his desk, along with a lumpy-looking little package. He looked around, but Newt was nowhere to be seen. Frowning, he brushed the paper scraps off his workspace and picked up the package, weighing it in his hands.

“Happy birthday!” a voice shouted directly into his ear, and Hermann yelped and dropped the package on the ground, whirling around with his cane already half-raised defensively. Newt held up his hands in surrender, grinning. Hermann sighed.

“Must you sneak up on me like that?” he grumbled. Newt ducked down to retrieve the fallen gift and shoved it back into Hermann’s hands. “And really, Newton, you shouldn’t have gotten me anything.”

“Of course I got you something, it’s your birthday,” Newt said. “Anyway, it’s nothing big, so relax.” He bounced on the balls of his feet. “You gonna open it or what?”

“Yes, yes, alright,” Hermann said. He eased himself into his desk chair and set about unwrapping the package. Out rolled two slightly squished tangerines and a two-pack of novelty rainbow-colored chalk that looked like it was meant for drawing on sidewalks.

Newt was babbling before Hermann could react. “So I know it’s been really hard to get fresh fruit imported lately, so I ordered these from some dude online and they might be kinda not completely ripe? They smelled good though. And the chalk is kind of stupid, I guess, but, uh, June is also pride month, y’know, and I saw it in a shop and —” he cut himself off as Hermann looked up at him. “Ah, anyway. Happy birthday.”

Hermann picked up one of the tangerines, cupping it in both hands and smiling faintly. It _did_ smell fantastic. He lifted it up to his face and inhaled deeply. When he glanced at Newt again, the other man looked incredibly anxious. “This is… this is lovely, Newton, thank you,” Hermann said. “You really didn’t have to go to all this trouble. I mean, shipping in fruit can’t have been cheap…”

“I wanted to do something nice,” Newt said with a shrug, looking embarrassed but pleased. “And I mean, I’m your boyfriend now. I gotta step up my birthday game.”

Hermann’s face flushed at the word “boyfriend.” It had been a month and five days since he and Newt had, as Newt kept teasingly putting it, “taken their relationship to the next level.” Really, not much had changed, except now they spent a little less time arguing and a little more time making out behind the specimen tanks. Hermann certainly hadn’t expected _this_. He was a bit lost for words.

Instead of saying anything, he grabbed Newt by the upper arm and tugged him down for a kiss. Newt stumbled and steadied himself with a hand on the back of Hermann’s chair, the kiss lingering until Hermann was certain Newt was going to get a cramp from the awkward angle. When he pulled back, Newt was grinning goofily at him.

“Wow, I should get you presents more often,” he said.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Hermann chided, though he was smiling as well. “You know I hate my birthday.”

“Yeah, well I aim to change that today, buddy,” Newt said. “This is just phase one of Operation Make Hermann Like His Birthday.”

“Oh god,” Hermann groaned, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling in exasperation. “Dare I ask what phase two is?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Newt said, leaning down to press his lips to the underside of Hermann’s jaw. It really was remarkable how easily Newt could distract him with a kiss. He sighed softly and let his eyes close as Newt continued to kiss down his throat. Only when he felt the scrape of teeth did he swat Newt’s shoulder to make him stop.

“No hickeys,” he said sternly. Newt pulled back, smirking. “Really, Newton, be professional.”

“Love you,” Newt said, kissing Hermann’s frowning mouth. “Okay, enjoy your tangerines. I gotta dissect a lung.”

“Charming as always,” Hermann muttered to himself, watching Newt bound across the room to his side of the lab. He turned a tangerine over in his hands for a moment before carefully digging his thumb into the peel to start spiraling it off. It tasted a little sour, but Hermann savored it nonetheless.

 

Newt kept hinting that part two of his “plan” was to take place around lunchtime, so of course at 12:35 p.m. a Kaiju attacked. Hermann’s prediction model was accurate within 50 hours at this point, so neither of them should really have been surprised, but when the sirens went off Newt groaned loudly.

“Not today, come on, I thought it wasn’t due until tomorrow,” he said, tossing down his scalpel and peeling off his gloves. Outside the lab they could both hear people running to their stations, and Hermann got to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane for a moment and closing his eyes to collect himself. When he opened them again, he shot Newt a weary look.

“There is never a _good_ time for a Kaiju attack, Newton, I’d have thought you would know that,” he said.

Newt huffed. “Yeah, I _know_ , Hermann, but it’s your birthday, and —”

“It does not matter,” Hermann interrupted, voice tight and stern. “Now pull yourself together, we have work to do.”

The next several hours were a blur, chaos as PPDC employees huddled around holo-screens and ran back and forth, hollering at each other. Hermann’s face had fallen into the same grimace he always wore during Kaiju attacks, both from the intensity of his focus and the sharp flare of pain in his hip. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt a gentle hand against the back of his neck, and looked up from the screen he was hunched over to see Newt standing beside him, brushing his fingers briefly up into Hermann’s hair. Newt offered a small smile, and Hermann relaxed slightly under the soft touch. He didn’t quite smile back, but he felt the tension ease in his brow and the corners of his mouth. They just looked at each other for a moment, and then someone was calling Newt’s name from the other side of the room, and his hand trailed down to Hermann’s shoulder and he was dashing off again.

At a certain point, there wasn’t much for the K-Sci team to do but wait for the results. Newt started to clear space for the samples that would be incoming, and Hermann got to work plugging in the new data to tweak and perfect his prediction model. Both of them kept glancing at the holo-screen, and when the Kaiju went down they both sighed audibly with relief. Newt crossed the room and pulled Hermann into a hug, pressing a kiss to his cheek, and Hermann held him a little tighter. The Shatterdome echoed with cheers.

Newt leaned back from the hug and glanced at the clock on Hermann’s desk. “Jeez, it’s already after eight?” He squeezed Hermann’s waist. “C’mon, I have something else for you.”

“What are you talking about?” Hermann asked, bewildered. “Newton, we still have work to do.”

“Yeah, and I still have two parts of a birthday plan to complete,” Newt said. Hermann opened his mouth to protest, and Newt added quickly, “Twenty minutes, tops. We’ll be in here all night anyway, and the samples take a few hours to ship over. We can take a tiny break.”

Hermann sighed. “Fine,” he muttered, mostly because his hip was killing him and his eyes were aching from looking at the screens. Newt beamed at him, leading the way out of the lab and down the hall to his own quarters. When they stepped inside, Hermann spotted a larger, more nicely wrapped package sitting on Newt’s bed.

“Newton,” he said, frowning. “What is that? You already got me a very nice gift.”

“Sure, but this is part two!” Newt exclaimed. He let go of Hermann’s hand and scooped up the box, holding it out. Scrawled on top of the wrapping paper in Newt’s messy writing, it said _Happy Birthday 2: Electric Boogaloo._

Hermann didn’t take the package. “You really shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, Newton. It’s not worth all the fuss.”

Newt sighed, setting the package back on the bed. “Okay, seriously, dude, what is up with this anti-birthday thing? I thought maybe it was that you didn’t want a big party or anything, so I made sure it was just us, but you’re still being so… I don’t know. Why don’t you want me to do something nice for you?” He sounded genuinely hurt.

Hermann shook his head. “It’s not… it’s not that. I appreciate what you’re doing, Newton, I really do. You have to understand, growing up we never made much fuss about birthdays. It just wasn’t our way. Wasn’t my father’s way.” He folded both hands over the head of his cane and pressed his lips together to hide the frustration in his voice. “Once the war started, I suppose I didn’t see much point in acknowledging it at all. There are more important things to be thinking about and spending energy on.”

“Oh, Hermann…” Newt said in a sad sort of voice. He grabbed Hermann’s hand and led him to the bed, sitting them both down on the edge of it. “First of all, your dad is a bag of dicks, but we knew that already. Second of all, don’t you think the war makes birthdays even more important? I mean, dude, you made it another year ‘round the sun and we haven’t been obliterated yet! What’s more worthy of celebration than that?” He looked so earnest, squeezing Hermann’s hand, and Hermann felt an aching fondness for him. “Anyway,” Newt added, “you being born is one of the best things that’s happened to this world, and I think it deserves to be celebrated. So there.”

Hermann hardly let him finish his sentence before leaning in and kissing him, letting go of his hand so he could cup the back of Newt’s head and run his fingers through the short hair there. Newt sighed against his mouth, gripping the front of Hermann’s shirt, and they kissed until Hermann’s head started to swim and he finally had to pull back for air. Newt’s hair was a mess in the back, glasses slightly askew, and he was grinning with kiss-swollen lips.

“Was it something I said?” he asked teasingly, and Hermann shoved his shoulder half-heartedly, chuckling as he caught his breath.

“You are persistent to the point of irritation, but I must say, you can be rather sweet when you want to be,” Hermann said. He looked Newt in the eyes, hoping to convey without words how much what Newt had said meant to him. “Thank you, darling.”

Newt’s ears went pink at the pet name, and he smiled bashfully at the ground for a moment before perking up again. He grabbed the package and thrust it into Hermann’s hands. “Open it, open it,” he chanted.

“Settle down,” Hermann said. He eased open the wrapping paper with delicate precision, setting it aside to reveal a shoebox. He looked at Newton with a raised eyebrow, and Newt made a “keep going” gesture with his hand. Hermann pulled open the lid of the box to reveal its contents, and — he couldn’t help it. He gasped softly.

“So,” Newt said, once again chattering away before Hermann could respond at all. “I was in town the other day and I walked by this pawn shop, and you know how most pawn shops nowadays just have junk in ‘em, everything good’s already gone, but I saw this in the window! And I remembered you telling me in one of your letters about how you had a bunch of them as a kid, and so I thought, I dunno, you could start up your collection again.” He laughed awkwardly.

Hermann pulled out the toy robot with a reverence that likely seemed ridiculous for a child’s toy. It was made of metal and the paint was chipped in a few places, revealing some minor rust damage — this was an old toy, perhaps older than Hermann himself. He remembered a childhood of playing with such toys, fascinated by the idea of robots and mechs, relegating them to a prominent display shelf in his bedroom as he got older. When the war began and he’d joined the PPDC, he hadn’t taken any of them with him. Unnecessary baggage, his father would have said. Hermann clutched the robot a little tighter, embarrassed to feel tears pricking at his eyes.

“Do… do you like it?” Newt’s voice brought him back to the present, and he looked up at Newt, who was eyeing him nervously.

Hermann had to clear his throat before he trusted himself to speak. “This is extremely thoughtful. I don’t know what to say.” He smiled, laughing a bit at how choked up he was getting. “I love it. I love you.”

“And I love you,” Newt replied. He took Hermann’s hand and kissed his knuckles. Newt was normally so loud and _extreme_ in everything he did, that such little moments of tenderness still made Hermann’s heart flutter. He wanted nothing more than to gather Newt in his arms, fall back onto the bed and kiss him senseless, the work waiting for them in the lab be damned, but Newt was dropping his hand and getting up to rummage around in his desk.

“What are you doing?” Hermann asked him.

“Part three, baby,” Newt replied, turning around to reveal a melty-looking candle and a lighter. “I couldn’t get ahold of a cake, but I figured you needed to at least blow out the candles and make a wish. Or, uh, candle, singular. I only have one.” He shrugged apologetically before flicking the lighter open and (on his third attempt) lighting the candle. Cupping a hand around the flame to keep it from sputtering out, he walked back over to Hermann and held the candle up to him. “Here you go,” he said, and then, eyes widening, “Wait, wait! I have to sing to you first!”

“Oh you _really_ don’t —” Hermann began, but Newt was already singing, quietly but with gusto. He actually had a nice voice when he wasn’t singing terribly on purpose to irritate Hermann. It was embarrassing to be sung to, even with the two of them alone in the room, and Hermann stared at the candle with his cheeks burning instead of looking Newt in the eye.

He finished with a dramatic vibrato on the final “you,” and bowed, nearly sticking the candle flame up Hermann’s nose in the process. “Okay, _now_ you can make a wish,” he said.

Hermann considered for a moment. “I don’t know what to wish for,” he admitted. “This is going to sound cliche, but… you’ve given me so much today, it feels greedy to ask for more.”

“You’ve got years of birthday wishes to make up for,” Newt said. “You get a pass to be greedy this time.”

Newt was smiling at him so warmly, and Hermann wanted desperately for this to last. He envisioned a future, after the war was over, he and Newt living together in a house or even some tiny flat somewhere, spending their evenings watching movies on the couch or wrapped up in each other in bed for hours, never again having to worry about monsters bursting from the depths of the sea. He wished to spend a lifetime with Newton, however it took shape, so that every day could feel like this moment.

He leaned forward and blew out the candle. A thin curl of smoke drifted up from the wick, and Newt batted it away from his face. He set the candle aside and said, “You spit on me.”

Hermann rolled his eyes, and Newt laughed before holding out a hand. “We should probably get back. I think our twenty minutes are up.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Hermann sighed. He allowed Newt to help him to his feet, and they headed back down the hall toward the lab.

“So…” Newt said, reaching down to hold Hermann’s hand as they walked. “What did you wish for?”

“I believe the rule is that I’m not supposed to tell you,” Hermann replied. “Otherwise it won’t come true.”

“You’re no fun,” Newt lamented.

Hermann ran his thumb over Newt’s knuckles. “Don’t worry, love. You are involved. And,” he added, smiling softly, “I do think it will come true.”

Their work in the lab took them until nearly two in the morning before they both called it a night and stumbled back to Newt’s quarters, too exhausted to do more than fall into bed together and pass out almost instantly, tangled in each other’s arms.

It was, all in all, the best birthday Hermann had ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, thanks for reading!! leave a comment if u wanna, or hit me up on twitter! i'm @hermanngottiieb now, and tumblr @joshuawashinton !! i love to make friends and sing hermann's praises all day long


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